This blog on Texas education contains posts on accountability, testing, college readiness, dropouts, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues with additional focus at the national level.

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Saturday, September 03, 2016

‘Education savings accounts’ vouchers by another name by Greg Worthington

Kudos to Educational Policy and
Planning Program student, Greg Worthington for his excellent analysis and critique of a policy proposal that you will be hearing about this legislative session in Texas, namely, Education Savings Accounts, or "ESAs."

When you hear ESAs discussed, think vouchers. This proposal will get a hearing in the Texas Senate on September 14, 2016.

If you want to track this and other legislation this next session which begins officially in January—though hearings have already begun, as you can see—visit and bookmark the Texas Legislature Online.

You can also login and create your own account in the MyTLO section of the Texas Legislature Online so that you can track bills via bill alerts that allow you to follow them as they make their way through the session.

We've not yet begun the session but wanted to give folks a heads up regarding how they can get involved. An immediate step you can take is to reach out to your legislators and staff to tell them how you feel about such proposals. It really can make a difference right now for them to hear from you.

Another rough and tumble session, to be sure...

Angela Valenzuela

Published 12:00 am, Saturday, September 3, 2016

In July, the Texas Senate Committee on Education announced it will be studying a school choice program using education savings accounts, or ESAs.
ESAs may be a new concept to many Texans, but they’re simply a new
form of vouchers that already exist in Arizona, Florida, Mississippi,
Nevada and Tennessee.
What ESAs amount to is another effort to spend public money on
narrow private interests and convert traditional public schools into
businesses. This ultimately turns our children into dollar signs and
exacerbates already deep racial and socioeconomic inequities.

So how do ESAs function? State Sen. Don Huffines, R-Dallas, and John D. Colyandro, executive director of the Texas Conservative Coalition Research Institute, wrote an op-ed in the Dallas Morning News in June describing how ESAs would work:
“Parents apply for the program and un-enroll their child from public
school. Next, the state funds an account that parents can use to pay for
numerous services related to their child’s education. Parents could pay
private school tuition or a tutor, purchase curriculum for
homeschooling or a digital learning class, or save some money for
college tuition, for example. If parents don’t use all of their ESA
dollars in one year, they can roll over the remainder to the next school
year.”

So what does this equal in state funding? When school choice proponents propose ESAs in any state, they usually suggest
the state provide up to 90 percent of the funding that public school
districts receive per student for yearly maintenance and operations.
In Texas, that’s about $7,800 per student. Additionally, students
receiving special education services would be eligible for up to 100
percent of that funding.
ESAs have inherent fiscal issues that remain unaddressed.
Will ESAs be taxable or provide tax benefits like other government
savings plans offered to individuals, such as health savings accounts
and 529 college plan accounts?
Will ESAs keep up with increasing educational costs?
Will ESAs drastically increase noninstructional education costs, creating more overhead for taxpayers?
How do we safeguard against students being mislabeled for special education, thus giving parents more money than they need?
Additionally, no one has acknowledged students who need additional
funding through Title I and bilingual education programs in traditional
public schools. Will they receive extra funds?
These questions all need adequate explanations.
Another crucial issue is where this money will come from. Legal
issues arise if funding for ESAs comes out of taxpayers’ pockets. ESA
proponents in other states have asked for ESA funding to come from
public school funds.
While there is no explicit prohibition in Texas on funding education
outside of the public school system, ESAs are prohibited from receiving
funding from Texas’ school funds.
ESAs fail to meet Texas’ narrow constitutional mandate “to establish
and make suitable provision for the support and maintenance of an
efficient system of public free schools.”
Diverting funds from the support and maintenance of our already
underfunded schools and toward private schools that almost always have
parochial interests and aren’t held to the standards we set for public
schools would be the opposite of that mandate.
ESA proponents want to make the accounts available to all families,
including wealthy ones. This means taxpayers could be subsidizing
private school tuition for the children of wealthy families, thus giving
an unnecessary public handout to the wealthy.
There is also no promise that the best private schools will
participate. Do we wish to give handouts to subpar private schools? And
what if unsatisfied families bring their children, behind in the
curriculum, back to public schools? We’d be setting up those students
for failure while later spending additional taxpayer money on their
remediation.
This creates problems for those who argue traditional public schools
are plagued by wasteful spending and that corporate reforms such as
establishing vouchers, charter schools and ESAs would force a more
“efficient system of public free schools.
Those who make this claim argue that forcing schools to compete for
students — as private businesses compete for customers — pressures
traditional public schools to improve academics and frugality, or die
in competition. This, according to the theory, benefits students still
attending public schools. This hypothetical pressure is often called
“the tide that lifts all boats.” But the tide is unfounded. Recent
peer-reviewed empirical research has found damning evidence.
Larger school districts most often don’t feel competitive pressures
from other school-choice options (of charter schools) for a variety of
reasons. In many large urban areas, charter schools effectively enroll
additional students from the growth in the school-age population. When
charter schools actually drew significant numbers of students from
traditional public schools, the effect was dispersed throughout the city
and did not produce competitive pressure.
When schools responded to competition, spending more money on
academics wasn’t the typical response. Instead, it inspired a variety of
responses, with most schools spending more on marketing. Competing
schools realized their academic program might be a top-notch product but
that it wouldn’t sell without great marketing, just as in the real
business world.
In a recent study by Huriya Jabbar, an education researcher and assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin,
in New Orleans, where the entire district is made up of charters and
parents choose where taxpayer money is spent (as with vouchers),
marketing was by far the largest response by schools facing
competition.
Other responses to competitive pressures included researching the
market for better competitive strategies and avoiding competition by
either offering something other schools don’t or circumventing
regulations to cherry-pick the best students.
That is one of the worst things about competition in education. It turns kids into good and bad financial investments.
In New Orleans, one principal told Jabbar that “every kid is money.”
In other words, children become small piles of cash for school
budgets instead of young humans to develop. Further, students with low
test scores become liabilities, making those schools less able to
compete in the market. This results in those students being locked out
of the best schools and exacerbating already deep racial and
socioeconomic inequities.
The imaginary rising tide of school choice only offers these results:
schools turning into businesses, kids becoming good and bad money, and
an increase in social inequity — all unconstitutionally funded by the
taxpayer.
Whether school choice proponents recognize these effects of
competition on our education system, the consequences are real and
damaging. We don’t need more competition or for our schools to be run
like businesses.
Our education system has always needed reform, but not by private
corporate interests. Schools don’t need to be owned by corporations.
They need to be democratically controlled by the communities they serve.
Schools shouldn’t compete but collaborate, especially with educators.
More important, policymakers and schools should radically increase
collaboration with those communities that suffer most from our broken
educational system — communities that are largely poor and have
extremely high concentrations of minorities.
To this day, listening to these communities and their educators is an educational option we’ve never chosen.

Greg Worthington is a Ph.D. student in the Educational Policy and
Planning Program in the Department of Educational Administration at the
University of Texas at Austin.